Entertainment For Lively Minds
New Kindles
Has the (official) announcement of the new Kindles from Amazon "fired" up your interest or is it a damp squib?
I know that they're not going to be available in the UK from the start but they will be eventually surely and if they're the same price as they are in the States, they will be very tempting indeed. I know it's not an ipad, I know it's not got a big screen but if it's anything like as good and responsive as the colour Nook (which I assume it will be) then, about £130 for a 7in tablet seems quite a bargain.
I particularly like Amazon's swipe, presumably at Apple:
There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.
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The new Kindle reader
looks like a winner. Dropping the poxy little keypad and cutting down the size and weight is a great move. And the price... well! A bargain.
The new tablet looks good. If I didn't already have an iPad, I'd be very tempted; if it's got a screen that reads better than the iPad, I will be extremely tempted.
BTW, rumours are that Apple will cut the price of the iPad at their big product announcement next week.
Interested
Have a fairly large screen touchscreen android phone, and the Kindle app I feel works far better, with touchscreen swipe than the current Kindle. So a touchscreen kindle with internet access to match my phone would get my attention.
Don't care.
I like real books.
That's interesting
Your comment suggests that you've seen the Kindle brand name and thought, ebook reader and not looked beyond that. That's perfectly OK but I wonder whether Amazon realised that this would happen when they added a multi purpose device to the Kindle family.
Tend to agree...
...with you. They have established Kindle as the ebook reader of choice and now have to persuade us all that it does more. Not an easy trick to pull off - especially as it sounds as though it is not a serious challenger to the iPad, the obvious comparator, in terms of functionality. It will be fascinating to see how this develops.
I'm sure it's got many buttons and gizmo's
but I still like paper, cardboard and the old technology of glue. And I like having shelves and shelves of the things. And I love mooching around in second hand book stores.
Guess this Kindling doo-dah isn't really aimed at people like me.
But you use a computer
I assume that you are using either a PC or a phone to post your messages, surely that means that the new Kindle could be aimed at you. It's not a proper ebook reader (it has a shiny screen for a start) it's a tablet. It will do video viewing and internet browsing far better than it will do ebook displaying, neither of which are done very well by books!
I know.
I'm just a seething mass of contradictions. But I'm not that teccy and I'm not in love with 'kit'. I don't have an ipod for instance. I still like my wall of records and CDs. But I do love the smell and the feel of real books and I really can't see any Kindle ever coming close to that.
The thing with the [e-ink] Kindle
is – and I speak as a fan – that you have to understand its strengths and limitations.
Firstly, the screen is really nice. It's much closer to the experience of paper than it is to a computer screen. It's also small and light and the battery lasts forever. If you're absorbed in a book, you forget you're reading from a machine.
On the flipside, it's only good for reading predominantly text-based content that you read in a linear direction. So things like novels, poetry, biographies and polemic. Where it falls down is non-linear formats like textbooks, magazines and newspapers. And for anything with lots of pictures, or where layout is important.
But there's no rule to say that having a Kindle stops you buying books. Sometimes it's cheaper to buy a paperback than a Kindle book. You might just use it for travel and holidays, and for the huge amount of free books you can download that are out of copyright.
Not ready yet.
Fine for reading text, but I will become interested in these things when they can adequately replicate the experience of reading a print magazine or thumbing through a nice big coffee table book. Few more years of R&D away from that yet.
Sounds Brilliant!
When they make say, a 17 inch tablet, that's the same weight as an ipad and a full day battery life, I don't think I'll ever buy another magazine... mind you, I think I'd need a separate device to keep in the toilet!
In the toilet ...
... I can't imagine a computer replacing paper.
Or the bath
I'm really hoping it's a fad. Can't bear to lose bookshops as well as record shops. There'd be no point leaving the house.
I love having books around. I've got shelves of them in every room of my house. I've said it before and I'll say it again: A Kindle doesn't furnish a room.
Is the world becoming more like Farenheit 451 every day?
At last. Blimey,
I thought I was the only one round here.
As I've said before, despite the hype and the fuss and the statistics I've only seen two people using one. Went to Spain and everyone on the beach was reading proper books. Went on the tube in London and saw one person with a Kindle. Maybe I just keep going to the wrong places. I suspect there's a lot of Amazon-financed hype going on but I am also reasonably confident that not enough people give a shit for it to really have any long term effect on real books. Hope so anyway. We still love real books, whatever Amazon say.
Commuting into London
Lots of Kindles on the train, and unlike most kit I see, a large proportion are being used by women.
I subscribe to several magazines on the iPad
and they're exact replicas of the print version - colour, adverts, photos, etc. Presumably at least one of the new Kindles will offer this capability?
This isn't about books,
and it's not about media. It's about Amazon having your credit card number and - crucially - getting direct access to how and where you spend your money on-line.
(EDIT) Interesting debate here: http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/fire
It's about media too
I don't disagree with the author's point (if he's correct in what he says), but Amazon have a lot of content and if there's one thing Amazon's good at (like Apple), it's making it easy to buy stuff from them.
Most Kindle owners (including me) attest to buying more books. Amazon get their 30%.
They already have my credit card number
So do John Lewis. So do Apple. So do Sainsbury's. Why has a tablet made it worse?
Apple and Amazon
have a huge amount of vertical integration in their markets, a lot of brand loyalty and generally happy customers. Something a lot of other companies would literally* give their right arms for.
* © Jamie Redknapp
It's
all about how big corporations find out how and where you spend your money and tie you into consumer patterns you buy from them; effectively you're paying for the privilege of giving them personal information which enables them to sell you more. If you're happy with that, fine. Really. Millions of people are! But it's not quite the same as giving your credit card number to a high street store.
It's inevitable, though. There'll be a huge market for "smart clothes" that give out your GPS by Tweets. It's a Facebook world.
But it's not about books. Not about reading and ideas and learning. It's about giving numbers away.
I am the only one
who ties myself into consumer patterns. I am prepared to credit myself with enough intelligence to way up the pros and cons of any deal and only do it if I think its a good deal.
And it is exactly the same as giving your card number to a high street store. The Tesco club card is the absolute case study on consumer data and many people are very happy with that deal. And they had to go into the store to sign up at the beginning.
Its not all evil either - if I go to the pub regularly, and the landlord asks me if I want my usual or he suggests something I might like, its the same principle as Amazon suggesting things I might like to buy really. Just in a nicer environment (unless you live in a pub and buy from Amazon in which case the environment is the same).
Good for you, Leedsboy!
Stay happy.
Nope
I will shop around, but will almost always go back to Amazon because, among other things, I trust them. That means a lot and if they start messing with my data, they'll lose that trust pretty quickly.
As far as the recommendations I get from them, they need to sort their act out if they're going to take any cash from me on the strength of them - I've spent some time trying to hone the info they have about me (I like recommendations and have discovered artists on Emusic with the "if you like this you may like these" lists) but have yet to see a useful item on my listing. I get emails based on what I searched for a few weeks back when I've already spent my money. If I buy stuff from one store, online, I really have no choice that they store info on what I buy (unless I decide to open a new account for each purchase), I understand that. With Tesco, and Sainsburys etc, I don't have to allow them to link all my purchases so I don't - if they were a bit more honest about it I might be more inclined but while they sell the cards based on the advantage to me rather than a mutual advantage, then the forms will stay at the counter... actually I think I may have a Tesco card because I bought something online from them once and you had to sign up.. I don't think the data has ever done them any good though.
The problem with recommendations
is that the website believes that everything you buy is for you. Buy a few presents for people and it will totally mix up your tastes.
Amazon
With Amazon you can tell it not to use things for recommendations but it is hard work. My latest list of recommendations is headed by a printer cartridge! I think the level indicator on my printer is in a better position to judge if I should buy one of those. It also has recommendations based on the tracks on a free compilation album I downloaded. It's too much of a pain to correct things so the whole lot generally gets ignored... which I assume isn;t the intention.
Yes and no
I agree regarding insidious marketing; however, in terms of books I disagree.
I've a bit of knowledge of this, as I work in and around publishing and I also have a Kindle website running at the moment (a how-to guide).
There's been a bit of a quiet publishing revolution going on, which has implications for the big publishing houses.
It's partly the print-on-demand model of publishing, but it's mostly in the form of eBooks and — by virtue of their big market share — the Kindle.
Put simply, in the old days, you had to have a deal with a major publisher and you'd earn something like 12% on a hardback book and 8% on every paperback sale. So, for the sake of argument, you got an average of something like 80p for every book sold.
You can now, however, do it yourself, put your book on Amazon and sell it for £2, of which you can trouser £1.40.
Of course the problems are twofold; there's going to be a lot of lousy books published and it's a very crowded marketplace out there. But in terms of volume of books in the market, it's probably going to be a good thing.
Are there restrictions?
If the price of the amazon subsidy on this hardware is that I won't be able to install the apps I want to then I probably wouldn't be interested as it smaks of ipad type retrictions. Conversely, if you can install whatever apps you like (there are at least 10 browsers in the Amazon app store), then the restrictions of the preinstalled browser are surely a minor irritation.
From what I've read
You can only use Amazon's app store; there's no access to Google Marketplace.
(Although some hacker will have got root access by the end of the week, so I suppose you could run a vanilla Android installation on it, if you're sufficiently motivated.)
But thats my point
I know there's no Google Marketplace access but as I said, there are already many browsers available from the Amazon Android store... hopefully it will be possible to install from other places as well (like I can on my Android phone) ... but I doubt it.
Ah
Sorry, the perils of speed reading.
I guess it depends on how good the browser is (it'll be a standard Webkit browser I expect).
I don't buy the "all your web browsing will be stored on Amazon's servers" line – they wouldn't get away with such a gross invasion of privacy.
This looks like a reasonable summary
Apple at the premium end, Kindle subsidized by content purchases at a price point below everyone else's production cost, and everyone else struggling in the middle.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/amazons-kindle-fire-just-nuked-the-tablet-...
It seems plausible, as there's only going to be so much subsidizing or bundling the others can achieve via channels like telcos and ISPs.
A slight tangent
About a month ago I got an update for the Kindle app on the iPad that withdrew the option to make purchases from Amazon from within the app. A backward step in functionality that was forced upon Amazon given Apple's insistence that they get 30% of any sales apps generate.
The good news is that Amazon's iPad Kindle Cloud reader works just as well, and has the added bonus of working on my PC if you use either Safari or Chrome. The bad news must be for Apple - the more restrictions they invoke to protect their revenue, added to their refusal to allow Flash or USB connections, the easier it's going to get for the opposition to offer something more flexible and functional.
I think Apple
have shot themselves in the foot here by being too greedy. They're all for HTML5 and its associated technology when they're on their anti-Flash crusade, but they want all third-party products to be delivered through the App Store so they can get their 30 per cent.
So what happens is that the likes of Amazon (and the FT I think) start to deliver content through Safari, which Apple has no control over at all.
A bit "naughty".
Apple removed the "buy books" part of the Kindle app via an update to the app so I spent 30 minutes trying to discover where it had gone. Not really cricket.
I've got a foot in both camps - I love books and I love Kindle.
Not really a problem as such
I knew they were forcing that change and it seems as hostile as you make out, but I also knew that I could browse to Amazon through the browser, buy the book I wanted, and it immediately synced to the Kindle app without the Apple tax. Screw them. And it was on my iPhone, not the iPad.
Didn't I read something recently along the lines that
Windows 8 mobile won't support Flash?
As I understand it
Windows 8 for PC won't support Flash when it's in tablet/Metro mode (but it will when it's in PC/Windows mode).
I don't know about the phone.
I use an Android Phone as an eReader
Not all the time (I still like "books") but I've got some good free stuff on there from the classics section. I also spend a lot of time on my PC.
I never saw the point in an iPad: huge cost, quickly out of date, and doesn't do a lot I can't do with the above. However, for the price Amazon are talking about, I'd be tempted to get one just as a bit of a "gizmo" to play with. I'm probably not the only one.
Me too
I think that's the thing with the ipad, too expensive to justify as a "toy" and not really portable enough. I think, for me, the killer app will be a tablet version of the Sonos app, if there is one, and its as good as it could be, then I'll probably buy a couple of Fires. They certainly make ipod touches start to look expensive.
I'll
get my coat.
There is probably
an app for that.
There's nothing like
a real coat though.
There is if its
a Mac.
bravo...
Bravo indeed.
Nice one sir.
Agreed
Although that coat needs to be non-glare and non-scratch!
Kindle app
I got the kindle app for my iphone a while ago, and almost forgot it was there until recently. Just for the hell of it, I thought I'd give it a go: I bought Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman for £3.99 from Amazon, downloaded it directly to the phone (which didn't take long, despite a terrible connection) and hey presto, I was ready to go. It is very clear and easy to read, and is perfect for those moments when I find myself somewhere with a few minutes to kill and nothing else to read. I love "real" books too, and can't imagine ceasing to read them; but this serves a very useful purpose, and I'll certainly use it again.
It's an absolutely cracking book, by the way.
Latest on pricing and UK availability from What Hi-Fi.com
"The new basic Kindle will cost £89 in the UK and will be released on October 12th.
UK release information for the Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch has yet to be confirmed. Original story below.
Amazon has launched the Kindle Fire, its first multimedia tablet and a rival to the Apple iPad.
Set to go on sale for $199 in the US, the Kindle Fire is available for pre-order now and will begin shipping on November 15th.
Sporting a 7in screen, dual-core processor, a customised version of the latest Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS and direct access to Amazon's music, book and video stores.
Most notably, the Amazon Prime service will give direct access to streaming to 100,000 films and TV shows, and some 13 million songs.
The Kindle Fire is a wifi-only device, with no 3G access. Another notable absentee compared to most tablets is the lack of any camera.
It does however have 'whispersync' technology, allowing for wireless syncing of content between devices, for example your Kindle Fire and TV.
The standard Kindle meanwhile has had a price cut, now down to $79, and was joined by two touchscreen models.
The Kindle Touch, $99, and the Kindle Touch 3G, with unlimited 3G, for $149.
While release dates should be the same in the UK, the prices have yet to be confirmed."
£89? The queue starts here! And if the Fire is only £127, then I'll have one of those, too, please!
You'll be lucky!
If the $79 Kindle retails in the UK for £89 (which it does), then the $199 Fire will, at best, be £225 over here.
Walk this way...
Not quite...
Amazon.com doesn't show local sales tax, whereas of course amazon.co.uk does add on VAT, so it isn't quite as straightforward as gizmodo suggests.
The $79 Kindle is the Special Offers version, which is a US-only model. The Kindle being sold in the UK goes for $109 on amazon.com. That converts to £69.70. Add on VAT, and you get £83.64, which isn't much of a difference.
Reckon Amazon will cost it at £149
That price is ten times more attractive than £159 or £169. Price psychology, you see.
For the first time, I am tempted...
No chance Richie
See my post above...
You want adverts in your book, sir?
That bottom of the line Kindle is cheap for a reason:
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/amazons-kindle-price-punking/
What Amazon have achieved is both spectacular and very scary.
Scary, but pretty much the same stunt
that Opera have pulled providing a pre-formatted page cache to speed up the browser experience (so they see everything you visit and do), Google with a Chrome browser/device that tells them who knows what about your on-line behaviour, or Flash which snuck in hidden uncontrolled cookie facilities you don't have access to but the advertisers/site owners do (along with the never ending stream of vulnerabilities).....
Unless we really understand these technologies and the privacy implications, and have international laws that do actually protect everyone everywhere, we're pretty much screwed anyway.
Am I paranoid, or just a realist ? Who trusts any corporation as far as you could throw them anyway?
Looks like they scrapped ..
.. the massive and obtrusive Amazon logo at the top that used to annoy me so much about previous versions. That alone is some huge move forward as far as I'm concerned. One thing you can say about Apple is that they don't allow their branding to actually affect the design and customer experience.